Re: Shy teenager


"Anne Rogers" <annekh23@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:55oia9F265fnbU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You know, in general, I agree with you. If you were to say Dell, Nike, Reebok, Ford or many other companies that have employees overseas or outsource overseas, I would agree with you.

Although people in India and other countries where Microsoft has offices get paid less, the buying power of the money the recieve and the standard of living is probably similar to life here in the US.

I don't know about people who work for Microsoft in India, I suspect they do ok, it's the Indians and other nationals that work for Microsoft in the US that have the problems.

Bill Gates actually earns thousands less than any of his employees. In fact, I think he is the lowest paid employee in the entire company. His annual wage is $1. Of course, he makes up for it on company stock. Of course, Bill Gates no longer runs the company. There has been a new CEO for a few years. Bill Gates spends a lot of time on his charity.

true, but then the employees do not get particularly great stock options and there is little benefit to having options if you don't have any spare money to actually purchase them. He ends up doing a surprising amount of day to day running, though he is supposed to be completely stepping down from that in 2008.

Employees who are janitors and such may make a marginal living. However, I think the vast majority of employees, here in the US and abroad, make a living that is above the mean and median income for their area. If any of the employees have trouble making ends meet, I think it is rarely because the means are not adequate. I am not saying that employees can expect a life of luxury, however.

I'm talking about educated employees, to get a visa to come from another country, you have to have education and experience. They may make above the mean and median for the area (but the area around Microsoft is affluent, so possibly not), what is unfair is that they make less than a US national doing the same job. The vasy majority of US nationals who work at microsoft would be able to own there own home, within 10 miles of campus. Most non US nationals live in rented apartments, when you dig deeper, they are either being employed at a lower level than would have been attached to the job had a US national been doing it, or being paid at the lowest amount possible within the level.

One guy I worked with came from India. When he went to work for Microsoft, he took a pay cut. However, I don't know how much of one. He was only in the US for two or three years, so I don't think he had a green card. Because he came from outside the company, I imagine that he was paid at a higher level, although Microsoft still had to sponsor him for working papers (I think).

While I don't have much of a problem with US companies employing people outside the US at decent market rates that lower than US rates, I don't think it is fair to bring them to the US and not pay them the same amount of money as US workers., unless they are coming to the US for only a few months and their living expenses are mostly paid. But to bring them to the US for a long time, you should give them fair pay. You can make it clear that they will go back to the same pay scale if they work for Microsoft in India, though.

In this particular case, I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't employ people who aren't in the US. Microsoft sells software to just about every country. I think it is only fair that he employees people in every country. In addition, Microsoft probably has nice offices overseas. And certainly Microsoft lifts the economies of the places where they employ people, whether it is in Washington or Hyderabad or Ireland.

I agree, but I wasn't talking about those people and even in the developing world, Microsoft employees out of the US probably do very well out of it. I'm talking about those people that are flown into the US, given very little information about life in the US, how much it costs to live in the US and so on, then get here to find the simply because the cost of living is fairly high in the area around Microsoft that they may well be worse off than before and certainly worse off than if they had worked for Microsoft in there home country.

This doesn't make for good will amoung employees or happy employees. It's rather stupid, in fact.

I remember when I was software engineer, there was a big project due (overdue, really). To speed things along, the company brought several quality assurance folks from Hyderabad (they were the company's employees) into the US to do the testing for maybe 4 or 6 weeks.

This was not only a bad software development practice (the developers should not need a slew of testers to do their work properly), but there nothing these people could do in the US that they couldn't do in Hyderabad.

I also rather suspect Bill Gates has no idea that this is even going on, it seems to be at a middle management level that decisions about pay of new employees are made.

A few thousand dollars to make an employee happier and more productive. That's is a good investment.

Anne


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